Pal Szekeres

Hungarian wheelchair fencing athlete Pal Szekeres poses during a training session at the 2011 World Fencing Championships in Catania on Oct. 10, 2011.

Pal Szekeres is the only athlete to have won medals at both the Olympic and Paralympic Games. He took bronze in the Team Foil event at the 1988 Olympics in Seoul, and hoped to become a fencing coach after ending his competitive career. But in 1991 his plans veered off course when a bus accident left him confined to a wheelchair. He won a gold medal at the Paralympic Games in Barcelona the following year. Five more Paralympic medals—two in Atlanta, and one in Sydney, Athens and Beijing—followed. “I was the unlucky guy who was an Olympic medalist and had a bus accident,” he recently told the International Paralympic Committee. “But I think it has opened a door.” In London look for him to pass through it—again.